Clever Archiving

Video portals such as YouTube or Vimeo offer a wealth of curious and entertaining short films. If you want to enjoy them offline, a small tool called Movgrab can help.

A video on Youtube will only launch if you access it with your browser and have enough bandwidth to spare. Unfortunately, you don’t get the movie for keeps or for processing, and you can only pass on the link. To add insult to injury, the portals often force you to watch some advertising.

The Movgrab command-line tool offers a way out; it downloads the video completely on request and saves it as a file on the hard drive. The program supports a wide range of portals and formats, and it allows the use of proxy servers.

YouTube offers more than just funny kitten movies; you will also find more than 60 million music videos. With a native YouTube client for Linux, you can use this online jukebox as conveniently as your local music collection.

Until now, watching YouTube videos offline has been an awkward business, possible only with Firefox plugins or similar contraptions. Now, with the help of Creative Commons licenses, this could soon change.